Very recently there have been two rather important books written relating to the subject either directly or indirectly. The first one is “Chief Culture Officer” by Grant McCracken, which came out just over a week ago. The second one is “Netnography” by Robert Kozinets, which is still in print. McCracken’s book argues for the necessity to create an organization that “gets” culture, or at least have somebody in the organization who does. An organization should be aware of its and its brands’ place in culture to manage its meaning (and most of all, not to mismanage it!). Kozinets’ book on the other hand is – as the name suggests – about how to do ethnographic research online. It’s intended for researchers and companies alike. Of course, Kozinets’ book also has some arguments as to why a company should do this kind of research, but as a general rule I’d say that McCracken’s book is more about the “why” and Kozinets’ is more about the “how” of uncovering a brand’s meaning.

I haven’t had the time to read either book completely (there are free previews available, check the sites), so apologies if the following arguments are featured in the books and I seem like I’m passing them as my own (I’m not). Also apologies for either author if they felt misrepresented in the the “why/how” categorization above.

In the past, only a few companies (usually big ones) actively engaged in ethnographic research. To some degree it was a matter of a unappreciation for cultural aspects of the brand, but for many companies I’d guess engaging in ethnographic research may have been just too costly or time consuming to do. You’d need to commission a research team, arrange the interviews or field work dates and then wait a rather long time for them to decode the findings and write a report, and even then you couldn’t be sure you had enough data. And sometimes you’d have to do is in multiple locations if you were a global brand. To put in simple terms: it just wasn’t worth the ROI for many companies.

This is where a method like netnography comes in. If anything, social media sites offer an almost endless stream of different and rich cultural meanings – especially for brands – that can be accessed quite quickly. If a skilled researcher spends an afternoon scouring through social media sites, he or she will have at least a preliminary feel for a brand’s meaning at the end of the day. This I think is another benefit of netnography for companies: to be able to do scale your qualitative research projects from “quick and dirty” with limited but somewhat relevant results to large scale meaning mining. I have my reservations about Twitter, but its value in getting a quick feel for your brand’s meaning is invaluable. Twitter really is zeitgeist on tap. Status updates on Twitter (or Facebook) are what McCracken calls “phatic communications” or to quote McCracken:

This is communication with little hard, informational content, but lots of emotional and social content. Phatic communications doesn’t get much said, but it has social effects so powerful, it gets lots done.

I suspect both McCracken and Kozinets would cringe if the principal arguments for buying their books were “doing qualitative research is faster and cheaper now”, but I think this is an important perspective as well. If anything it’s a good additional selling point to get your company at least consider taking qualitative research more seriously. If you need more convincing about the importance of qualitative research, I’m sure both books have more than plenty compelling arguments. My guess that in the future companies will have a netnography team or a “cultural social media team” sitting next to the social media customer service team they have in place.

Here are the book covers to help you spot them on the bookshelf.

From the Wall Street Journal:

“Rebooting movies after the success of Batman is only logical, Kirk.”

The new “Star Trek” movie, opening next month, boldly goes where no “Trek” film has gone before: back to the beginning. It’s set in the decades before the start of the TV series, returning to the young adulthoods of space adventurers James T. Kirk and Spock and their first voyage on the Starship Enterprise.

Some of Hollywood’s biggest franchises, including “X-Men” and “Terminator,” are taking a similar back-to-the-future approach this summer. To refresh familiar film sagas and grab new audiences, studios are increasingly offering up stories that trace the early years of popular characters and tell epics from their beginnings.

Sami had spotted an interesting article about “cultural latency”, which made me think about the current state of Hollywood productions, and especially reboots and comicbook movies.

Digital distribution removes many of the friction points within the distribution system – making it more efficient, economically speaking.

But this also seems to lead to far more rapid cultural decay rates – sales charts now are driven almost exclusively by novelty – top selling DVDs are just what came out that week.

A reboot or a superhero movie has a clear business logic: you leverage a known cultural product and an existing fan base to assure you have an inbuilt audience before you even start advertising it. There’s a very clear reason why Hollywood is going for more predictability in its revenue: as the movie is released on the big screen, it’s just a matter of time when a pirate version is out there on the streets or on the internet. That’s why the opening weekend smash has become so important: get most of the money early, wait a few weeks and then start working on the home theater version, as the article stated.

Getting people to come on an opening weekend requires a lot of advertising and buzz, which has helped inflate film budgets considerably. It’d be interesting to see how much advertising is taking proportionally from a film’s budget nowadays. My guess is that the proportion has grown considerably.

Given all this, we should look for more movies in the Da Vinci code, Marvel or reboot variety. However, there’s a countering to the old “common denominator” theory. What Henry Jenkins calls “transmedia storytelling“, where a cultural product (film, book, comic etc.) is just one entry point to the franchise’s “world”, is becoming an increasing trend in storytelling. Think Star Wars and the Matrix: these franchises feature multiple products: games, books, comics etc. and they all work as individual works, but together they all tie in to the parent mythology. This is making storytelling deeper and more engaging, even as average Joe’s can enjoy just the individual works one at a time. The fans have their work cut out for them in mining the worlds and making sense of them.

Relating to this, Grant McCracken has argued that popular culture is becoming more and more self-referential, and thus smarter all the time. Star Trek was peppered with small references (albeit to Star Trek mythology) throughout the film. It’s becoming more and more rewarding watching Hollywood films if you have a wide range of pop culture knowledge.

It’s going to be interesting to see how we see and interpret movies is going to change if more and more movies are going to be safe bets. But on the other hand, Batman proved that a complex and darker movie could also make it big, and I think you could see a bit of risk taking in how Star Trek was done. I doubt that even Watchmen would have been greenlit without Batman’s success.

But on that note, here’s the trailer on the new adaptation of Sherlock Holmes, by Guy Ritchie:

“If there is anyone out there who doubts that America is a place where anything is possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.”

Those are the words with which Barack Obama declared himself as the next president of the United States. Truly a historic day and one that will do a lot of good not only for Americans, but the world-at-large. But aside from politics, I have another interest in the subject of Obama’s election.

Grant already touched upon this subject briefly, saying that either candidate winning would have effects on culture and commerce alike. Certainly, given how president-centric the US political structure is made to be, whoever is sitting in the White House will have an enormous influence on people’s daily life and perception of self. It’s my perception that for Americans the “idea” of America has more of an effect on the self than in most countries: the idea of the self-made man, the belief in democracy, America’s manifest destiny as the leader of the free world etc.

All these core American beliefs have been toiling in crisis pretty much from the start of George W. Bush’s presidency – especially for liberal Americans who happen to populate the majority of America’s biggest cities. I believe the Iraq war and John Kerry’s unlikely and crushing defeat in the 2004 election had left many liberals disillusioned and disappointed in America. As Douglas Holt points out in “How Brands Becom Icons”, one of the biggest drivers for consumption of identity products is how people aspire to meet a given culture’s or society’s identity models or “myths”, as Holt puts it. When there’s a disconnect between your own life and what you perceive your immediate culture expecting from you, this is when the tension and anxiety will create the most opportunities for brands and other cultural products (especially movies and music) to soothe these anxieties.

If we go back 30 years, we’ll find one of the most classic examples of a cultural product soothing national anxieties. As George Lucas himself put it: Star Wars was “really about the Vietnam War”. America had lost a big chunk of its belief in itself as the hero of the world after what conspired in Vietnam. In large part this was because this was the first fully televised war, people got to see the brutality of war in its fullness. The nation was badly divided when the war was over (as Obama said, even worse than it is now because of the Iraq war) but Star Wars, while it didn’t totally heal the American spiritual wound left by Vietnam, gave America the permission to believe in heroism and American ideals again. I’m sure the movie would have been a colossal success even without Vietnam, but it would have never found this kind of cultural resonance on its own. Similarly, I think Obama would have found followers and support on his own, but his message and persona hit a cultural key that really resonated. A lot of people say that without the financial crisis Obama wouldn’t have won. I say without the “crisis of democracy” (as Al Gore put it), a transformational figure like Obama wouldn’t have even been in the running.

I have some theories of how consumption and culture was shaped during the Bush years. I for one think that the DYI consumer movement was in part fueled by a sense of distrust and cynicism towards the establishment and any authority – especially by liberals in America. The Bush years have provided academics with a very interesting historical era to mine; not only politically but also culturally and commercially. I’m sure we will be reading about these findings a lot in the near future, but right now I just know that marketers shouldn’t neglect this newly found trust in old American ideals. It will be interesting to see which (big) companies will capture this new zeitgeist first, and which ones will do it best, not by just playing lip service to “change”.